Happiness within Organizations

Abstract

Happiness is something we, as humans, seek to attain yet we are not entirely familiar with what exactly it means. Typology of fundamental needs (Desmet & Fokkinga, 2020) explains comprehensively, yet detailed enough, the needs we must fulfil in order to be happy. An average person spends a third of their life at work (Pryce-Jones, 2010) and in that one-third of life, how those needs get fulfilled or harmed influences the happiness of an individual. Scholars of positive psychology argue that “positive states help people to thrive, mentally flourish and grow psychologically” (Frederickson, 2001). At the same time, happy people have been proven to be up to 20% more productive (Sgroi, 2015). Therefore, not only as a social responsibility should an organization put their focus on employee happiness but as an economic benefit as well. However, the vast science of happiness and the nature of the context (an organization) makes it an “open” or “wicked” challenge (Bijl-Brouwer et al., 2019). The challenge starts from analyzing happiness of employees within an organization, then introducing initiatives to improve happiness and finally, tracking the progress and effectiveness. However, the current scenario and limitations of happiness within organizations combined with the multi-faceted nature of happiness hints towards an even bigger challenge: achieving a happiness mindset.This project is an attempt to operationalize the typology of fundamental needs within the context of an organization in order to aid in achieving a happiness mindset. Borrowing knowledge from systems thinking and phenomenological hermeneutics, a theoretical framework is developed which is translated into a practical approach and tested on 4 different cases. The learnings and real life narratives obtained from this practical approach are utilized in developing the final outcome: “Ajar Process”. It is a 4 step process: Awareness, Alignment, Action and Acknowledgement. It starts with making the participants aware of the typology of fundamental needs, making them capable of sorting their real life experiences according to the need fulfillment. This awareness is then mutually aligned with all participating individuals, so that the perception of what happiness means in that context is similar for everyone. This prompts meaningful conversations leading everyone into a pro-active attitude, coming up with mutually decided initiatives to improve the happiness through need fulfillment. Eventually, the effectiveness of those initiatives is evaluated and a decision is made which step of the process to go to next. In this way, the process never ends and a repeated use results in a happiness mindset. Design concepts are proposed per step of the Ajar process which aid in executing that step effectively. Ajar process is presented as a service expansion for Emotion Studio (design agency) where they would offer to execute the first sprint of the process within the organization and hand it over to them for future executions.